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The European Parliament will adopt next week in Strasbourg a resolution asking for a radical bureaucratic boost on defence matters. The draft resolution “on the implementation of the Common Security and Defence Policy” that has already been approved by the Committee on Foreign Affairs (voted by EPP, Liberals/ALDE and Social Democrats), is a major step towards further…

EU leaders are planning a massive arms buildup—and, amid panic over terror attacks, the critics have been marginalized. With the eurozone in permanent crisis, Brexit on the horizon, and far-right parties on the rise from Germany to the Czech Republic, the future of the European Union has never seemed so much in doubt. There’s no…

BY SELECTIVELY IGNORING inconvenient facts, policy expert Gerald Knaus put forward the 2016 E.U. deal with Turkey as a model for migration policy and the only way to both save the U.N. Refugee Convention and contain populist forces in Europe. Knaus, the founding director of the European Stability Initiative, recently offered this so-called realist model as a solution to the high numbers of asylum seekers and…

THE SHELTER OFFERED to Amira since she got to Europe amounts to a plastic sheet she has slept under for the past ten days. The Syrian mother of three was taken to Vathy, a camp on the Greek island of Samos where nearly 3,000 people are spilling out of a facility built for 700. She…

WIDAD MADRATI REMEMBERS the first snowfall at Oreokastro like most children would, as a thing of wonder. It threw a brilliant white cover over the squalor of a refugee camp pitched in the grounds of a disused warehouse in the hills above Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki. The 17-year-old Syrian did not mind that the water…

European officials are becoming increasingly worried that the E.U.-Turkey deal could fall apart. With few returns and thousands of people trapped on the Greek islands, the E.U. is encouraging stronger measures – such as opening more detention centers on the islands to speed up asylum proceedings and facilitate deportations – to rescue the deal. In…

Last month, 10 Syrians boarded a flight organized and staffed by the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, on the Greek island of Kos, believing their destination was Athens. Instead, they landed in the Turkish city of Adana. The Syrians had wanted to seek international protection in Greece, and carried documents indicating their intention to initiate…

Electoral failures of the Cristian Democratic Party (CDU) and Merkel in Germany have been credited extensively to her refugee policy. Equally, the Bratislava and Vienna summits have pushed again the refugee crisis on the forefront of EU diplomatic brinkmanship. In this context, Greece is set to be affected, yet again, more than any other…